More Fool Me: A Memoir

By Stephen Fry

The British comedian recounts the highs and lows of his wild years: “A gifted writer with a perfect sense of comic timing and anecdote-spinning . . . Lots of fun.” —Kirkus Reviews

By his early thirties, Stephen Fry—writer, comedian, star of stage and screen—had, as they say, “made it.” Much loved on British television, author of a critically acclaimed and bestselling first novel, with a glamorous and glittering cast of friends, he had more work than was perhaps good for him. As the ‘80s drew to a close, he began to burn the candle at both ends. Writing and recording by day, and haunting a never-ending series of celebrity parties, drinking dens, and poker games by night, he was a high functioning addict. He was so busy, so distracted by the high life, that he could hardly see the inevitable, headlong tumble that must surely follow . . .

Filled with raw, electric extracts from his diaries of the time, More Fool Me is a brilliant, eloquent account by a man driven to create and to entertain—revealing a side to him he has long kept hidden.

“Fry is an astonishingly charming fellow: erudite, playful and capable of writing in a style so intimate that readers can picture themselves sitting next to him at a splendid dinner party as he rather one-sidedly entertains the entire table.” —Slate

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781468312287

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry is an award-winning comedian, actor, presenter, and director. He rose to fame alongside Hugh Laurie in A Bit of Fry and Laurie (which he cowrote with Laurie) and Jeeves and Wooster, and he was unforgettable as General Melchett in Blackadder. He hosted over 180 episodes of QI and has narrated all seven of the Harry Potter novels for the audiobook recordings. He is the bestselling author of the Mythos series, as well as four novels—Revenge, Making History, The Hippopotamus, and The Liar;—and three volumes of autobiography—Moab Is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles, and More Fool Me.

Book preview

Chapter One

There is nothing very appealing about showbusiness memoirs. A linear chronology of successes, failures and blind ventures into new fields is dull enough. And then there is the problem of how to approach descriptions of collaborators and contemporaries:

‘She was adorable to work with, incredibly funny and always intensely cheerful and considerate. To know her was to worship her.’

‘I was captivated by his talent, how marvellously he shone in everything he did. There was a luminosity, a kind of transcendence.’

‘She always had time for her fans, no matter how persistent they were.’

‘What a perfect marriage they had, and what ideal parents they were. A golden couple.’

I could there be describing actors, TV show presenters or producers with total accuracy, leaving out only their serial polygamies, chronic domestic abuse, violent orgiastic fetishes and breathtaking assaults on the bottle, the powders and the pills.

Is it right of me to be searingly, bruisingly honest about the lives of others? I am quite prepared to be searingly, bruisingly honest about my own, but I just don’t have it in me to reveal to the world that, for example, producer Ariadne Bristowe is an aggressively vile, treacherous bitch who regularly fires innocent assistants just for looking at her the wrong way; or that Mike G. Wilbraham has to give a blow-job to the boom operator while finger-banging the assistant cameraman before he is prepared so much as to think about preparing for a scene. All these things are true, of course, but fortunately Ariadne Bristowe doesn’t exist and neither does Mike G. Wilbraham. OR DO THEY?

The actor Rupert Everett in his autobiographical writings manages to be caustic in what you might call a Two Species manner: bitchy and catty. The results are hilarious, but I am far too afraid of how people view me to be able to write like that. Very happy to recommend both his volumes of autobiography/memoir to you, however: Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and The Vanished Years. Ideal holiday or Christmas reading.

So I now must consider how to present to you this third edition of my life. It must be confessed that this book is an act as vain and narcissistic as can be imagined: the third volume of my life story? There are plenty of wholly serviceable single-volume lives of Napoleon, Socrates, Jesus Christ, Churchill and even Katie Price. So by what panty-dribbling right do I present a weary public with yet another stream of anecdote, autobiography and confessional? The first I wrote was a memoir of childhood, the second a chronicle of university and the lucky concatenation of circumstances that led to my being able to pursue a career in performing, writing and broadcasting. Between the end of that second book and this very minute, the minute now that I am using to type this sentence, lies over a quarter of a century of my milling about on television, in films, on radio, writing here and there, getting myself into trouble one way or another, becoming a representative of madness, Twitter, homosexuality, atheism, annoying ubiquity and whatever other kinds of activity you might choose to associate with me.

I am making the assumption that in picking up this book you know more or less who I am. I am keenly aware – how could I not be? – that if one is in the public eye then people will have some sort of view. There are those who thoroughly loathe me. Even though I don’t read newspapers or receive violent abuse in the street, I know well enough that there are many members of the British public, and I daresay the publics of other countries, who think me smug, attention-seeking, false, complacent, self-regarding, pseudo-intellectual and unbearably irritating: diabolical. I can quite see why they would. There are others who embarrass me charmingly by their wild enthusiasm; they shower me with praise and attribute qualities to me that seem almost to verge on the divine.

I don’t want this book to be riddled with too much self-consciousness. There is a lot to say about the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, and you may find the way I go about it to be meandering. I hope a chronology of sorts will emerge as I bounce from theme to theme. There will inevitably be anecdotes of one kind or another, but it is not my business to tell you about the private lives of others, only of my own. I consider myself incompetent when it comes to the business of living life. Maybe that is why I am committing the inexcusable hubris of offering the world a third written autobiography. Maybe here is where I will find my life, in this thicket of words, in a way that I never seem to be able to do outside the bubble I am in now as I write. Me, a keyboard, a mouse, a screen and nothing else. Just loo breaks, black coffees and an occasional glance at my Twitter and email accounts. I can do this for hours all on my own. So on my own that if I have to use the phone my voice is often hoarse and croaky because days will have passed without me speaking to a single soul.

So where do we go from here?

Let’s find out.

Catch-up

I have a recurring dream. The doorbell sounds at three in the morning. I struggle out of bed and press the entry-phone button.

‘Police, sir. May we come in?’

‘Of course, of course.’ I buzz them in. A series of charges that I cannot quite make out are chanted at me like psalms. I am arrested and cuffed. It is all very hurried and sudden but entirely good-natured. One of the policemen asks for a photograph with me.

We cut, as dreams so cinematically do, to a courtroom, where a much less sympathetic judge sentences me to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. He is disgusted that someone who should know so much better could have committed so foolish a crime and present so ignoble an example to the young, impressionable people who might errantly look up to him. The judge wishes the sentence could be longer but he must abide by the guidelines laid down by statute.

To the sound of mingled cheers and jeers I am conducted down to the police cells and into the back of a van, which is delightfully decorated and exquisitely supplied with crystal, ice buckets and an amazing array of alcoholic drinks.

‘Might as well get lashed, Stephen. Last drinks you’re going to have for some while.’

I’m at the prison. All the convicts have turned out to greet me. Their welcome is deafening and not in the least threatening.

A vast dining hall. I sit to eat in a huge wide shot like Cody Jarrett as played by James Cagney in White Heat. And then we see me in mid-shot, as cool and unruffled as Tim Robbins’s ageless Andy Dufresne, taking my tray to the table.

It is clear that I am not in the joint for some appalling sexual or financial misdemeanour that will cause me to be beaten and tormented by my fellow convicts. I have done something that is wrong, that is disapproved of by ‘society’ yet which is tolerated with amusement by criminals and even police officers.

Nobody lets me see the newspapers. They will only upset me, I am told. It is all very strange.

Friends visit me. Always staying the other side of the bars. Hugh and Jo Laurie. Kim Harris, my first lover. My literary agent Anthony and my theatrical agent Christian. My sister and PA Jo. There is something they are not telling me, but I am comfortable in prison and feel sorry for them, having to leave and return to the world of bustle and business.

I am in the corridor cleaning the floor with an electric polisher. It has two rotating discs with gently abrasive pads press-studded to the base, and I enjoy holding it like a pneumatic drill, feeling its power under me, how I have to keep it from flying free of my grip as it pulls like an eager dog at the leash. The floor comes up in a glossy shine. This is the life.

An old lag walks up to me, coughing on his tightly rolled-up cigarette, which wags up and down as he speaks. He has seen a letter in the governor’s office, which he Pledges and tidies daily. My sentence is to be extended. I will never leave.

I take the news well. Very well.

I wake up, or the dream peters out or merges into something strange and silly and different.

It is easy to attempt a little oneiromancy here. My real life is a prison, so a real prison would be an escape. That would be the one-line pitch, as they say in Hollywood. I am one who, like so many Britons of a certain class and era, was born to institutions. School houses merge into Oxbridge colleges which merge into Inns of Court or the BBC as it was or into regiments or ships of the line or into one of the two Houses of Parliament or into the Royal Palaces or into Albany or the clubs of Pall Mall and St James’s. All very male, all very Anglo-Saxon (a few Jews allowed from time to time – it is vulgar to be racially obsessed), all very cosy, absurd and out of date. If you really want to have a look at this world in its last hurrah just before I was born then you should read the first eight or nine chapters of Moonraker, a Bond novel, but with an opening that is simultaneously hilarious, fantastically observed, drool-worthily aspirational and skin-pricklingly suspenseful.

I observed of myself in my second book of memoirs, The Fry Chronicles, and earlier in my first, Moab is My Washpot, that I seem always to be obsessed with belonging. Half of me, I wrote in Moab, yearns to be part of the tribe; the other half yearns to be apart from the tribe. All the clubs I belong to – six so-called gentleman’s clubs and goodness knows how many more Soho-style media watering-holes – are vivid testament to a soul searching for his place in British society. Maybe prison is the ultimate club for people like me.

‘That’s institootionalized,’ as Morgan Freeman’s Red puts it in The Shawshank Redemption, the world’s favourite film.

I am wary of interpretations. I refuse to interpret my life and its motives because I am not qualified. You may choose to do so. You may find me and my history repugnant, fascinating, indicative of an age now long gone, typical of a breed whose time is up. There are all kinds of ways of looking at me and my story.

If you want to bore someone, tell them your dreams. I seem to have got off on the wrong foot. I plead forgiveness for, while I would not claim that there is anything experimental about this memoir, I would ask you to be ready for a flitting backwards and forwards in time. The experience of writing about this period in my life has had some of the qualities of a dream: unexpected, freakish, disgusting, frightening, incredible and at one and the same time crystal clear and maddeningly occluded. It is my job, I suppose in this far from divine comedy, to be Virgil to your Dante, guiding you as straightforwardly and tenderly as I can through the circles of my particular hell, purgatory and heaven. In the following pages I will try to be as truthful as I can; I will leave interpretation and, generally speaking, motivation, to you.

Very Naughty, but … in the Right Spirit

Aside from anything else, there is the problem of plunging in as if you already know my past…

Bertie Wooster, the hero and first-person narrator of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, used to say to his readers at the beginning of each new book something along the lines of ‘If you’re one of the old faithfuls familiar with previous episodes of my life as given to the world in the volumes Moab is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles, now would be a good time to get on with a few odd jobs around the house – go for a walk, wash the cat, get on top of the backlog in your email inbox and so forth – while I fill in newcomers with the story so far …’ only, of course, he would be referring not to Moab or The Chronicles, but to The Code of the Woosters, say, or Right Ho, Jeeves. And it is most unlikely that he would make any reference to inboxes. But you see the point.

There is a faint chance that you might have come across the two predecessors of the memoir you are now holding in your hands, in which case I can imagine you tapping your foot with impatience when it comes to my ushering the uninitiated down old and well-trodden pathways. ‘Yes, yes, we know all that, get on with it, man,’ I seem to hear you mutter from far away. ‘Let’s come to the new stuff. The juicy bits. Scandal. Showbiz. Drugs. Suicide. Gossip.’

On several occasions, as I meet someone in that embarrassed wine-sipping huddle that always occurs before a dinner party, for example, they might tell me how much they thoroughly enjoyed such and such a book of mine. All fine and charming, if a little embarrassing: ‘One never knows what to say,’ as Agatha Christie’s alter ego, the popular author Ariadne Oliver (so splendidly played by Zoë Wanamaker in the television adaptations), often remarks. Anyway, an hour or so in, internally warmed by vinous glassfuls, I might tell, as one does around the dinner table, a story of some kind. I will notice the very person who confessed to admiring my book laughing heartily and whooping in surprise at the punchline. As they wipe the tears of infatuated merriment from their eyes, I will think to myself, ‘Hang on! That exact story is told, word for word, in the book they just assured me they liked so much!’ Either, therefore, they were lying about having read the book in the first place, which, let’s face it, we’ve all done – so much easier not to read books, especially the books of one’s friends – or, which is in fact quite as likely if not more so, they have read it and simply forgotten just about every detail.

What remains, as one ages, of a book, is a smell, a flavour, a fleeting parade of sense-images and characters, pleasing or otherwise. So I have learned not to be offended. One does not write expecting every sentence to be permanently branded into the memory of the reader.

Far from being a curse, such memory leakages are actually rather a blessing. We all become, as readers, a little like the Guy Pearce character in the film Memento, only without the attendant physical jeopardies. Every day a new adventure. Every rereading a first reading. That is true at least of recently read books. I can recount almost word for word the Sherlock Holmes, Wodehouse, Wilde and Waugh that were the infatuations of my childhood (not to mention the Biggles, Enid Blyton and Georgette Heyer), but don’t ask me to repeat the plot of the last novel I read. And it was a really good one too, The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson, which won a Booker Prize. I should have read it two or three years ago when it came out, but I am hopelessly behind with contemporary fiction. Almost everything I read these days is history, biography or popular science. I laid The Finkler Question down, finished from end to end about three months ago, thoroughly satisfied. I remember laughing a lot, there was a (racist?) mugging and a lot of very clever and compelling writing about anti-Semitism and all kinds of other delicious and wildly intelligent prose. But apart from the name Finkler and that incident I honestly don’t think I could tell you what happened in the book, only that I loved it. I am way past the age when stories and even exact phrases and speeches stick.

There are seventeen steps up from pavement level to Holmes and Watson’s 221b Baker Street rooms; the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685; and the Battle of Crécy was fought on 26 August 1346 (the precise day isn’t that hard to fix in my brain as it is my father’s birthday). These and all kinds of irrelevant nonsenses I can reel off without recourse to Wikipedia. Exact phrases from Holmes, Jeeves, Mr Micawber and Gimlet (Biggles’s commando equivalent) come pouring back to me, especially French Canadian Private ‘Trapper’ Troublay’s habit of hissing sapristi! whenever he was perturbed.

I actually have a collection at home still of most of the works of Captain W. E. Johns, creator of Biggles and Gimlet (and of their female equivalent, the hearty and heroic ‘Worrals of the WAAF’). In a satisfactory row (on my shelf at least, if not in publishing order), three of the Gimlet books are Gimlet Lends a Hand, Gimlet Bores In and Gimlet Mops Up. Gay innuendo simply rocks. Even Monty Python couldn’t do better than that, although their Biggles Flies Undone parody made me laugh so much when I first read it in one of the Python books it gave me a serious asthma attack. True. It was the fact that they had so clearly read the books themselves with exactly the same attention to style and mannerism that I had that made me rock backwards, kicking my legs in the air in delight and wheezing like a dying emphysemiac. The point I suppose I am trying to make is that I will have the enormous pleasure of reading Howard Jacobson’s book again in a year or so as a fresh and new surprise.

A friend of mine pointed out recently how absurd it was that people reread so little: do you only listen to a piece of music that you love once? Anyway, shush. You’re distracting me. The whole point of this opening section is to fill in the newcomers on the subject of La Vie Fryesque. And if you are reading this and have also read my previous stabs at autobiography you have been warned: there will be repetition, and possibly even self-contradiction. What I remember now may differ from what I remembered five or ten years ago. But if you feel you know my life up until the ending of The Fry Chronicles and have no yearning for a redux reduction, you may happily jump from black arrow to black arrow or pop off and get on with your little tasks about the home, maybe settle into that TV box-set you’ve always meant to get around to because everyone else seems to have watched it but yourself. Let me try meanwhile to run by the relevant earlier history of my life as briskly as I can.

There is always the opportunity, I might add, for you to put this book down right this very minute and immediately download or buy in hard copy Moab is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles, consume them in that order and save both of us all this repetition, but I wouldn’t like to come over as greedy for sales. We’re all above that kind of unpleasant mercantilism.

So where do I pick the story up from? From whence do I pick up the story? Whence do I pick up the story? Alistair Cooke, the British journalist best known for his broadcasts from America for the BBC, once told me that when he was a very young man contributing material for the legendary C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian he had submitted a piece of copy which included the phrase ‘from whence’.

‘Tell me, laddie,’ Scott had asked, tapping an angry pair of fingers on the offending phrase, ‘what does the word whence mean?’

‘Er … from where?’

‘Exactly! So you’ve just written from from where – tautology: go and correct it.’

Cooke was foolish enough to stand up for himself. ‘Shakespeare and Fielding both frequently used from whence.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t have done if they’d written for the Manchester fucking Guardian,’ said Scott.

So. While the others are still at their chores, let me pick the story up for the new arrivals. The others can pick it up whence I dropped it. Doesn’t sound right to me, but there we are, Scott must have known what he was talking about.

Our hero, after multiple scholastic expulsions (this is me I’m referring to now, not Alistair Cooke or C. P. Scott – I’m attempting a paragraph of that Christopher Isherwood/Salman Rushdie kind, where I refer to myself in the third person: it won’t last long, I promise), after an adolescence steeped in folly, misery, heart-shredding mooncalf romance and a short lifetime of wayward self-delusion and multiple crookedness, a sly, cocky, guileful and self-fantasizing fool, found himself imprisoned for credit-card fraud and – still a teenager – on the brink of a life of permanent failure, incarceration, familial exile and squalid ignominy. He managed somehow to extricate himself from all this and acquire academic qualifications and a scholarship to Cambridge University. Well, he did not ‘manage somehow’, but broke through thanks to the combined wonders of flawlessly kind parents and his own late discovery that he enjoyed academic work very, very much and could not bear the idea of missing out on a real education, especially amongst the stones and towers and courts of Cambridge, where heroes like E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth had pursued their silly games, rigorous work, lyrical sodalities, sentimental friendships and semi-serious sacra conversazione – reading earnest and intellectually powerful papers from hearthrugs while nibbling anchovies or sardines on toast and being touched up by dons recruiting for MI6 or the KGB.

That Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook of Beyond the Fringe and John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle of Monty Python and Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie of The Goodies, let alone Germaine Greer, Clive James, Douglas Adams, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner and so on, had also been at that same university, eating up the stage generations before me, was a less self-conscious inducement, although I suppose if I am honest, a small part inside of me did somewhere dream of fame and recognition in an as yet inchoate form.

You do not, I believe, grow up, even if you are Stanislavsky, Brando or Olivier, knowing that you are a great actor. Much less do you grow up believing that you have it in you to make any kind of a career out of performance on stage or screen. Everyone has always known that it’s ‘an overcrowded profession’. We are most of us these days I suppose familiar with the tenets of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which quite cogently argues that no one ever made a success of themselves without having put in at least 10,000 hours of practice before breaking through. No one, not Mozart, not Dickens, not Bill Gates, not The Beatles. Most of us have instead put in 10,000 hours of wishing, and certainly as far as acting was concerned I had long thought I would like to take a stab at it but hadn’t gone much further than that. I think my first print review, ‘Young Stephen Fry as Mrs Higgins would grace any Belgravia drawing-room’, went to my head when I was about eleven years old.

‘Oooh,’ whistling intakes of breath. ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine actors unemployed for every one with a job, young fellow.’ How often would I hear this at drinks parties when I was a boy, such remarks always accompanied by the merest flash of a look acutely designed to assure me that with a face and string-bean body like mine I would never make a handsome leading man and should perhaps think of some other career.

‘Being a barrister is a little like being an actor,’ became my beaming mother’s comforting and hopeful mantra. For a while I went along with this and between the ages of twelve and fifteen would tell the Norfolk landowners and their wives to whose parties we came and went that I was all set to make it to the Bar. Norman Birkett’s Six Great Advocates was now my constant companion, and with all the repulsive self-confidence of the lonely geek I would bore my family with stories of the great forensic triumphs of Marshall Hall (my especial hero) and Rufus Isaacs, a great role model for any Jewish boy, since he rose to become Marquess of Reading and Viceroy of India. From a fruit market in Spitalfields to being curtseyed and bowed at and called Your Highness in the viceregal Palace of New Delhi. Imagine! And unlike Disraeli, a practising Jew. Not that I was ever that; nor were any of my mother’s immediate family. We were, in Jonathan Miller’s immortal words, not Jews, just Jew-ish. Not the whole hog. But then, as the Nazis showed, you don’t have to practise (even for 10,000 hours) at being Jewish to be beaten, exiled, tortured, enslaved or killed for it, so one might as well embrace the identity with pride. The rituals, genital mutilations and avoidance of oysters and bacon can go hang, as can the behaviour of any given Israeli government, but otherwise consider me a proud Jew.

My background and upbringing in rural Norfolk seem, from a twenty-first-century perspective, a bizarre throwback. I think our way of life was in fact old-fashioned even in its own time. A fish man every Wednesday clopping in by horse and cart, coal trucks, butcher’s, grocer’s and bread vans arriving to deliver whatever provender that wasn’t brought up to the back door by the gardeners for the cook, whose sister-in-law scrubbed floors on her knees three times a week. No central heating, no mains water, just coal or wood fires and a Victorian pump-house to draw up water, one source being a cistern reliant on soft rainwater which filled the tank that fed all the baths and wash basins with soft but rusty-brown bathwater, the other source drawn up from a groundwater aquifer which supplied the house’s single drinking-water tap, fixed low down over a wooden bucket in a vast Victorian kitchen warmed only by a coke-fed Aga. There was a china-pantry, a food-pantry, larders, sculleries and an outer-scullery with a huge butler’s sink that could only be filled from a grand brass hand pump. Outside the china-pantry, just by the door to the cellar stairs, hung a long rope which ended in a bulging red, white and blue sally. If any of us children were out in the garden and were needed, the rope would be pulled. The clang of the bell could be heard half a mile away at the local pig farm, where I sometimes liked to spend my time ogling piglets. Every time I heard that bell, my stomach seemed to fill with lead, for unless it was lunch or supper time it nearly always meant Trouble. It clanged the news that somehow I had been Found Out and was required to stand on the carpet in front of the desk in my father’s study and Explain Myself.

Back inside again, on the wall next to the sally, was the predictable bell panel, which would have told servants from a previous era into which room to scuttle, bow and bob for instructions. Instead of the pulled-by-wire shaking bells so familiar from today’s country house films or television series, ours – being an in-its-day modern Victorian house – took the form of a wooden framed box. Each room’s name was printed beneath a red star in a white circle which oscillated when an electric bell was pressed. It was said that my parents’ house was one of the first in its part of Norfolk to be thoroughly ‘on the electric’. I am sure the circuitry was never upgraded from the time of its building in the 1880s until my mother and father finally sold the place nearly a century and a half later. The ceramic fuse boxes, the solid bakelite and brass three- or two-pin plugs were at least eighty years old when I was a boy in the 1960s and I was always astonished by the eye-achingly dazzling white three-pin plugs I saw in friends’ houses, just as I was astonished by, and more than passingly envious of, the wall-to-wall carpeting, colour televisions and warm radiators that my friends took for granted. Not to mention their easy access to cinemas, shops and coffee bars. Such ordinary, modern households as theirs may not have had trained plum and pear trees stapled to the gable-ends of their outbuildings, nor could they boast built-in hand-carved linenfold cupboards that a contemporary antiquarian would orgasm over, but they were, to my restless rusticated brain, as exciting as my life and household were dull.

We move along, as an estate agent would say, from the pantries and cellar door, past the bell panel

Reviews for More Fool Me

[electrascaife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The third installment in Fry's series of memoirs, this one covers the late 1980s through 1993. The book can be broken down into three parts; the middle bit is the actual memoir part and is just as enjoyable as the earlier two books, but the first section is a summary, essentially, of those first two books and the last part is a lightly edited reproduction of his diary entries for the last half of 1993. So it feels sort of...slipshod? Phoned in? Like maybe the publisher wanted this more than Fry wanted to write it? I dunno. Anyway. I still love him to bits even if this one was a bit disappointing.

[alexbolding · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Part 3 of an autobiography of sorts. It consists of several parts that provide a recap of Fry’s early life up to his break-through in Blackadder and Fry and Laurie. Next he writes about his coke addiction (a period of 15 years) and how it works on a day-to-day basis. The final chunk consists of diary notes in the second half of 1993, giving a wonderful overview of his busy daily life in that period. With hindsight Stephen wonders himself how he could have achieved such productivity levels (writing sketches for Fry and Laurie, writing his second novel, doing Voice Overs for commercial products to hark in some money, reviewing scripts, going on book signing sprees all over the country, joining in Tv shows and university events, shooting a movie flick for the Labour party taking the piss outta them, and the Tories), while at the same time engaging in such debauchery – sniffing lines of coke in the loo, playing poker at the Groucho club, attending opening nights of operas and movies, organising dinner parties, making anagrams of the names of invited guests, sniffing some more coke, etc. What is remarkable in the extreme is that Fry does not seem to have any love life or sex life – he only alludes to some tempting young God here and there, but no action on his part. The style of writing is ‘vintage Fry’ – half the time making depreciating notes to self, castigating his own naughtiness. In between all this banter, Fry shares some homilies and truisms, for which I have come to adore him (remember the dialogue with the Anglican bishop where he wonders what God meant with leukaemia in young kids?). Just some titbits: Fry observes that despite the bullying and trolling that youngsters face these days, each teenager lives a better life now than one hundred years ago when ‘physical punishments, cruel sadistic beatings and sexual abuse went unquestioned in schools and in the home’ (p.42). When he has the opportunity to acquaint himself with William Goldman, Fry asks what Robert Redford is really like. Answer: ‘tell me what you would be like if for twenty-five years you had never heard the word “no”’ (p.75). The key line in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The importance of being earnest’ that turned out to be such an epiphany for the young Fry, setting him off giggling throughout the night and paving his own future career as a linguist and comic, is cited many times in the autobiography: ‘I hope Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?’ A nice anecdote on Sir John Mills, his wife and lady Di shows the kind of fun the British upper class excels at. When Fry probes John on the secret of his marriage, John explains that they still behave like naughty teenagers to each other. Once at a dinner with lady Di in attendance, he scribbled a small naughty note to his wife, inviting her for some hanky-panky at his place. He has the note delivered to the ‘ravishing blonde’ by a waiter. But then the guy drops the note by mistake with lady Di. Diana read the note, had the writer pointed out for her, and blew him a kiss.

[sonyans-160483 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant, belly achingly funny and, at times, hearbreaking insight into this famous actor's/writer's/comedian's/activist's days of addiction. Brutally honest portrait of his fears, insecurities, friendships and much, much more. Anecdotes that will make you laugh, cringe, worry and, mildly put, go through a full spectrum of emotions. Stunning dissection of a genius mind.

[eglinton_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

National treasure Stephen Fry is a witty and engaging, industrious and well-rounded character. Such that even his offcuts, his casual asides and banter, must have plenty of interest and charm. Which is more or less what we have here in this unconvincingly assembled jumble of reminiscence and confession. Or, as it may also be, a cocaine-fuelled outpouring of energy and humour and invective. But it’s all still eminently readable, and who cares precisely which bits are invented or embellished in say, the account of Damien Hirst blowing his Turner Prize cheque at the Groucho club in one go? Fry’s showiness, keen to please and to be noted, is balanced somewhat by his candour, always willing to own up to his own flaws and limitations, the book’s title being an obvious example.

[thecrow2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The third volume of Stephen Fry’s autobiography is as entertaining read as the previous two. My only issue with it, and it’s a quite annoying one to tell the truth, when in the last quarter of the book he’s lengthy copypasting his diary without any editing. That’s the worst part of the book, the long, repetitive descriptions of days after days are quite often very boring.

[aront-2 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I know one star is very harsh, and I rarely give a book that kind of rating. But precisely because Fry is so brilliant with such a strong voice, this book is a total POS. I didn’t mind the rehash. The cocaine chapter was annoying only because he promised to explain why it was such an awful mistake, but he never did. The diary section is unconscionable. All would be forgiven, however, if he h1d written about what this book is obviously leading up to, his first major breakdown. Maybe it's still too difficult a topic to touch. But this whole book is utter garbage & absolutely pointless celebrity drivel & gossip, without the why & wherefore of that event. Fry claims he believes in absolute honesty, but this book is a lie. Don't bother reading it.

[olegalca · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As much as I love Stephen Fry, I wasn't impressed with this volume of his autobiography. Too much focus on his addiction to cocaine and he ends the book just before his rock bottom (I assume).

[thorold_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This third volume of Fry's memoirs has been sitting on my shelf since I found it under the Christmas tree some years ago, mainly because I couldn't think of any good reason why I would want to read it. Having read it, I find it even more difficult to think of something good to say about it: Fry is a clever, articulate and often very funny writer, but it's hard to fathom why he thinks anyone would want to read his self-lacerating account of the cocaine he sniffed and celebrities he ate and drank with during the early days of his own TV fame in the 1990s. He seems to be showing off with one hand whilst he hits himself over the head with the other. Tedious and depressing.

[amanda4242_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The first part was much more scattered than I remember the first two volumes of his memoirs being. The last 40% or so was just diary entries from a few months in 1993, which gave you an idea of what he was doing with his life; the endless repetition of the work/club/coke/event cycle made for tedious reading. Not awful--and I may try it again on audio at some point--but I was hoping for much more.

[philipjhunt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this, perhaps in reaction to a review that suggested I wouldn't. Yes, Stephen Fry has led (is leading) an uncommon life, but that's what makes for interesting reading. He tells his stories with the humour and self-effacement with which we are familiar. What's not to like?Well, perhaps the last third of the book. For a little over a hundred pages we have the plain unadorned diary entries from 1993. There is too much of this really. We have a different Stephen Fry here. More cynical, less cleaned up, but I suppose, more honest. The effect is to provide the reader with another way into the Fry mind and soul. And it is effective. Just too much of it to be interesting reading. But then perhaps it is Fry's intention to show us that his non-stop routine of writing, performing, dining and simply appearing is eventually mind-numbingly boring. One might desire to have the odd day or two like Fry experienced in that year, but an eternal treadmill of such days can become Hell.

[polarbear123_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyed the first part. Don't expect a linear biography , or any biography to be honest, more a selection of fry musings. Second half is just diary extracts that make it hard to really feel sorry for Stephen fry and his mental illness, I mean his life has been pretty good really. Plus cocaine and copious drinking don't do much to help mental illness.